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From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

By JOHN REID BLACKWELL AND MICHAEL MARTZ

A new Richmond-based pharmaceutical manufacturing company has received a $354 million federal contract to help build a strategic, national reserve of essential medications and to make active ingredients for more than a dozen medicines used to treat patients with COVID-19.

And the ingredients will be made at a pharmaceutical plant in Petersburg, which could create about 350 jobs.

Phlow Corp., led by a doctor trained at Virginia Commonwealth University and working with the Medicines for All Institute at VCU’s College of Engineering, will develop a domestic supply of pharmaceutical ingredients by using advanced manufacturing processes that it says also will lower drug costs.

Phlow, based in the Virginia Bio+Tech Park in downtown Richmond, was co-founded by CEO Eric Edwards, who also was a co-founder of Kaléo, another Richmond-based pharmaceutical development company. VCU professor Frank Gupton is Phlow’s other founder.

“Phlow Corp.’s mission is to provide high-quality, low-cost, essential pharmaceuticals and their key ingredients through state-of-the-art, U.S.-based advanced manufacturing,” Edwards said in an interview Tuesday.

The federal contract is “important for the Richmond area, Virginia, and the nation,” Edwards said.

The company’s partners also include AMPAC Fine Chemicals, a California-based manufacturer that has a plant in Petersburg, and Civica Rx, a nonprofit established in 2018 that works to provide a stable supply of generic medications. Civica Rx has about 50 health systems as members.

“It’s a great story for the U.S., it’s a great story for Virginia, and it’s a great, great story for Petersburg,” Secretary of Commerce and Trade Brian Ball said Tuesday.

AMPAC will make some of the pharmaceutical ingredients at its Petersburg plant, which will be expanded, Edwards said. That plant reopened in 2019. It previously had been owned by Boehringer Ingelheim Chemicals Inc., which closed it in 2014.